In her presentation "Innovating with Natural Language Processing" at ITX Auckland 2014, Alyona Medelyan explained this emerging technology, and detailed some of the innovative uses of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies that are currently being explored and implemented.
NLP combines the disciplines of linguistics, statistics, algorithms and software development *1. Much of the software related to NLP is open source - a list is published on Alyona's website.
NLP solutions are already being used to understand and “mine” useful information from natural language (e.g spoken language, social media posts, large volumes of text). Examples from the presentation include:
- hands free commands and queries on the latest smart phones
- call centre queries directed to the correct information source
- first year law clerks no longer needed to pour through legal tomes for case law and precedent, real language searches are doing the work for them
- NLP software is producing classifications as accurate as the average library cataloguer
This presentation highlighted another digital technology trend: the convergence, or coming together, of a number of new technologies to offer a complete solution. Alyona identified the potential for NLP to combine with autonomous cars (a technology explored by Tony Seba in his workshop "Will You Disrupt or Be Disrupted" discussed in our blog "Digital Disruption and IT Governance – Business Trends for 2015") or hands-free driving scenarios.
For example by integrating NLP technologies, an autonomous car is able to respond to the command:
“Find the nearest charging station and go there.”
- NLP helps the "car" to understand the command (i.e. understanding the context of “nearest” and “go there” to mean “near to my current location” and “go there” to be the “charging station” she referred to earlier in the sentence – all things that are simple for humans but have traditionally been very challenging for computer systems)
- Other digital technologies built into the car, in combination with NLP, can then action the command (e.g. GPS identifies the car’s location, Mobile Wi-Fi connects to the Internet, NLP defines the search statement to find a charging station close to the car's location, NLP and Analytics assess the results and decide the closest station - perhaps even checking fastest routes based on traffic conditions - and finally the on-the board systems will navigate safely and autonomously to that location). Apologies to Alyona for any digital technologies left out!
The opportunities for NLP are clearly far reaching and likely to be disrupting to all real language occupations, business processes and business models.
Many Thanks to Alyona Medelyan and IITP for an excellence presentation and conference - ITX 2014 - New Zealand’s Conference of IT Innovation, Technology and Education, October 2014.
*1Alyona directed us to her publication "Mining Meaning From Wikipedia" - Olena Medelyan, Catherine Legg, David Milne and Ian H. Witte 2008" for further exploration of this topic.